Ho, ho, holiday movies

By James Sanford

This week, you get Steven Spielberg times two, while Matt Damon buys a zoo and Rooney Mara becomes 'The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo'

The cineplex has already welcomed Sherlock Holmes,
Charlize Theron, the Muppets and the Chipmunks. But there is even more
to come this week, with the arrival of two Steven Spielberg epics and
the eagerly awaited David Fincher remake of “The Girl With the Dragon
Tattoo.” What will make your spirits bright?

Opening today

“The Adventures of Tin Tin: The Secret of the Unicorn” —
If you are an 11-year-old boy, “The Adventures of Tin Tin: The Secret
of the Unicorn” may end up being your favorite movie of the year; if
you´re not, you´re likely to be less enchanted, even though director
Steven Spielberg´s slam-bang adventure (filmed with the motion-capture
process used in “The Polar Express” and “Beowulf”) is certainly not
short on action or colorful characters.

The movie is adapted from a series of comic books by
Belgian artist Hergé that have been popular in Europe for 70 years.
It´s no mystery why they appealed to Spielberg: Young Tin Tin (Jamie
Bell) is an adolescent Indiana Jones, springing from one perilous
situation to the next while collecting information and eluding the bad
guys. He´s accompanied most of the way by his faithful, resourceful
terrier Snowy and the boozy, clownish Captain Haddock (Andy Serkis),
who is more often a hinderance than a help. A dose of additional comic
relief is provided by Simon Pegg and Nick Frost as Thomsen and
Thompson, a Laurel and Hardy-style pair of clueless detectives.

Taken for what it is — a lavishly produced Saturday
matinee designed for kids — “Tin Tin” is enjoyable enough, but adults
may lose patience with its rush-rush pace and one-dimensional
characters.

“The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo” — Let’s start
with the question everyone wants to ask: How does Rooney Mara compare
to Noomi Rapace, the actress who became an international sensation in
the trilogy of Swedish thrillers adapted from Stieg Larsson’s
blockbuster novels?

Astonishingly, Mara finds some qualities in the
brilliant, turbulent and deeply troubled Lisbeth Salander that even
Rapace didn’t manage to unearth. Rapace’s Salander was a walking time
bomb in black leather, full of fury and feistiness. Mara sees Salander
as something closer to a hunted animal, not necessarily looking for
confrontation, but possibly ferocious when cornered. Rapace had a
vigilante spirit that gave her a scary, unsettling aura; Mara is a bit
more circumspect, although no less tenacious: You get the sense she’s
the kind of predator who sinks her teeth into her victim and hangs on
until her prey collapses from exhaustion.

Director David Fincher doesn’t have as much luck when it
comes to reinterpreting Larsson’s clever, complex shocker, which ties
together disgraced journalist Mikael Blomkvist (Daniel Craig, whose
Swedish accent seems to fade away before the movie’s halfway point,
although his performance otherwise remains thoroughly credible),
computer queen Salander, a missing woman, Nazi sympathizers, religious
fanaticism and a basement full of unsavory secrets. While Fincher’s
film is slicker and more polished than director Niels Arden Oplev’s
2009 adaptation — the credit sequence alone is almost worth the price
of a ticket — it’s not stunningly different. Aside from the inclusion
of extra sex scenes and an all-too-curious cat, most of Fincher’s
version is a fairly straightforward retelling of Larsson’s now-familiar
tale (although screenwriter Steve Zaillian does deliver one last-minute
surprise).

The highlights of the material are retained and
effectively enhanced by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross’ volatile, tingly
score, which combines ghostly piano, churning electronics and bursts of
white noise. Fincher does not gloss over the brutality, which means
that Salander’s repeated humiliations at the hands of a perverted
“guardian” (Yorick van Wageningen) are horrifyingly vivid and
stomach-churning.

Unfortunately, nothing can be done to save the awkward
sequence in which the villain thoughtfully explains every detail of his
sick scheme to a captured Blomkvist. It’s still like something out of a
third-rate TV crime drama, and it looks even sillier in the midst of
Fincher’s otherwise stylish and absorbing film.

Those who already know the story can focus on the movie’s
mesmerizing contrasts between its stars, the weather-beaten,
jagged-looking Craig and the deceptively delicate, almost bird-like
Mara, with her wide, anxious eyes and a face that could have been
fashioned by Modigliani. They’re a riveting pair.

“Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol”
(opening in non-IMAX theaters): Apparently, nobody ever considered
offering Tom Cruise the role of James Bond, which is why the star
launched the “Mission: Impossible” line. Based on a TV show that was
more memorable for its urgent theme song and its tagline (“This message
will self-destruct in five seconds”) than its content, the “Mission”
movies have always seemed like afterthoughts in Cruise’s career: They
are what he makes when he needs a sure-fire international success to
reinforce his box office bankability — or when he wants to collect a
major-league check for playing with cutting-edge gadgets, driving
dreamy cars and strolling through exotic locales.

That’s precisely what he does in “Mission: Impossible —
Ghost Protocol,” the fourth and probably best installment in the
15-year-old series. Ever-cool and always up for a physical challenge,
Cruise’s Ethan Hunt (of the Impossible Mission Force, naturally)
maneuvers his way from a Russian prison to Dubai, Mumbai and Seattle
while trying to prevent a terrorist known as Cobalt from detonating
nuclear weapons on U.S. soil. Assisting Hunt is a dutiful pair of
fellow agents, Jane Carter (Paula Patton) and Benji Dunn (Simon Pegg),
as well as Will Brandt (Jeremy Renner), an analyst who has more skills
than he originally admits to.

“Ghost” is directed by Brad Bird, who is making his first
stab at overseeing a live-action film after a glorious career at Pixar
(“Ratatouille,” “The Incredibles”). Bird does an admirable job of
coordinating and choreographing the film’s many set-pieces, many of
which involve vehicles tumbling through the air or buildings being
blown to smithereens.

Even so, it’s the spirited chemistry between Renner,
Patton, Pegg and Cruise that gives the movie its zip. Pegg is
delightfully funny, Patton radiates a fierce intelligence and the
sometimes prickly partnership between Cruise and Renner is compelling.

Opening Friday

“We Bought a Zoo” — In case you
might forget the name of the movie you’re watching, Matt Damon and
Maggie Elizabeth Jones kindly remind you once each half-hour: “We
bought a zoo!” they routinely declare (even though the property
actually looks a bit more like an animal preserve).

This is probably not the kind of branding we expect when animals are part of the picture.

Director Cameron Crowe — who may still
be smarting from the debacle of “Elizabethtown” in 2005 — is obviously
eager to have a hit, and he may get one, even though this generally
sunny, sweet-natured comedy-drama is hardly in a class with his earlier
works (“Say Anything,” “Almost Famous”).

“Zoo” is based on a true story, although writer Aline
Brosh McKenna (“Morning Glory,” “The Devil Wears Prada”) has changed
the location from the English countryside to Southern California.
Considering how the action unfolds in whimsical, only-in-the-movies
episodes populated by comfortingly familiar stock characters (the
persnickety bureaucrat, the smiley flower-child, etc.), that is
probably not the only liberty she’s taken with the facts.

But if “Zoo” is cinematic cotton candy, it’s not
indigestible, even when Crowe gets a bit too sticky-sweet for his own
good: His soundtrack music, which is often right on the mark in his
other films, gets a little overbearing here, and Jones is so achingly
winsome she makes Shirley Temple seem like Lisbeth Salander.

Damon (apparently continuing his new career path as the
world’s most appealing widower after losing cheating spouse Gwyneth
Paltrow in “Contagion”) is first-rate as Benjamin Mee, a former
journalist who’s trying to put together a new life for himself and his
kids after the death of his wife. Colin Ford brings a convincing
brusqueness to Dylan, Benjamin’s brooding teenage son, and his fiery
argument with Benjamin is easily the film’s most hard-hitting and
poignant moment.

Conversely, there’s a pleasantly mellow tone in
Benjamin’s brushes with zookeeper Kelly Foster (Scarlett Johansson),
who has to educate her new boss about proper terminology — they’re
called “enclosures,” not cages — and the intricacies of attending to
animals.

But “War Horse” is also a catalogue of Spielberg’s
strengths — and flaws — as a filmmaker. It’s a movie that’s much easier
to admire than it is to love.

Albert Narracott (Jeremy Irvine) is an English farmboy
who develops a deep attachment to a colt named Joey, born on a
neighbor’s farm. Albert’s sentimental father (Peter Mullan) plunges the
family dangerously into debt to buy Joey, then breaks his son’s heart
by selling Joey to the cavalry when England goes to war with Germany in
1914. Most of “War Horse” recounts Joey’s adventures as he goes from
owner to owner during World War I while Albert joins the Army to
continue his search for his beloved friend.

Spielberg knows how to compose breathtaking sequences,
and “War Horse” includes several, as well as some wonderful moments
involving Joey’s visit to a fragile French girl named Emilie (Celine
Buckens) and a terrific, very funny scene in which an English soldier
and his German counterpart have to call a temporary truce in order to
save Joey from a perilous situation in the middle of No Man’s Land.

But too often in “War Horse,” the gorgeous images
suffocate the emotions. Spielberg spends so much energy on selling the
story that he doesn’t do a particularly good job of simply telling it.

Don’t expect the shocking, no holds barred visuals of
“Saving Private Ryan”: Spielberg and cinematographer Janus Kaminski
have made World War I look like a theme park attraction. Every mud
puddle, every piece of flaming debris, every fallen soldier seems to be
artfully arranged.

It’s the same problem that weighed down Spielberg’s
screen version of “The Color Purple.” He’s tackling material that’s
full of pain and trauma and heartbreak, yet he can’t resist his urge to
cook up crowd-pleasing entertainment with manipulative tricks and
sumptuous production values. So even the darkest corners of “War Horse”
are brightly illuminated and given a glossy coat of paint.

Mary Poppins once told us a spoonful of sugar helps the
medicine go down; Spielberg apparently believes a barrelful of the
stuff will make even the toughest tales palatable.